The present invention relates to data center infrastructure, and more particularly, this invention relates to providing a virtualized network independent of hypervisors used to provide the virtualized network.
Network virtualization is an emerging data center and cloud computing trend which aims to virtualize a network as seen by end stations in a way that greatly simplifies network provisioning in multi-tenant environments, as well as traditional environments. One of the more common techniques of achieving network virtualization is to use network overlays, where virtual tunnels are established between edge network switches to which end stations connect. The tunnel is actually implemented by encapsulating packets emitted by a source end station in an overlay header that transports the packet from the source switch to a target switch via an internet protocol (IP)-based network. The overlay header includes an identifier (ID) that uniquely identifies the virtual network. The target switch strips off the overlay header encapsulation and delivers the original packet to the destination end station. In addition to this tunneling mechanism, the edge switches participate in an address discovery protocol, which may be learning/flooding based, or lookup-based.
One conventionally used solution to providing the address discovery protocol involves performing the functionality described above at the so-called virtual switches, which are actually software entities that reside within Hypervisors. Virtual switches connect multiple virtual end stations, e.g., Virtual Machines (VMs), to each other and to the physical network.
The drawback of virtual switch-based solutions is that virtual switch software for multiple Hypervisors (e.g., ESX, Hyper-V, Xen, KVM, etc.) from multiple vendors (e.g., VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, RedHat, etc.) need to be updated individually, which is cumbersome and non-uniform in its execution. Accordingly, a solution that is capable of providing the address discovery protocol that is Hypervisor-agnostic and requires no updates to virtual switches would be very appealing to continue to expand and grow the use of virtual overlay networks in data centers.